nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/004250.htmlPosted by: Faren Miller on December 14, 2003 10:48 AM... And soon, I'll take more time out to gleefully peruse my birthday present (given early so I could appreciate it on the weekend instead of Monday when my time will be much more limited), the Kino Video 5-DVD set of the birth of cinema, "The Movies Begin." 133 complete motion pictures. As I told Cathy, even if I only enjoy 128 of them, it's still perfectly swell ...

terryblogh.blogspot.comSunday, November 09, 2003Meditations While Making Analog DigitalThe Project is going ahead apace. Converting my old videos to VCD (and eventually DVD) requires a shitload of ones and zeroes, but I'm rediscovering some interesting stuff on the video shelves. You see I stack them vertically and two deep on the current white Ikea bookshelves and with around 1400 movies there, it's dead easy to forget what is in the back row of each shelf.I'm trying to prioritise the digitisation on the basis of entropy. The movies most likely to be going to shit get first go. (And also, Sally's videotapes of The Goodies which include episodes that weren't on the recent DVD release... a promise is a promise.) All this requires a bit of rummaging around the shelves and the occasional discovery of videos I had forgotten I had. Stuff like these:Sixty minutes of five minute episodes of the old Trans-Lux cartoon series The Mighty Hercules. Dave Friedman's The Erotic Adventures of Zorro and The Long Swift Sword of Siegfried. Richard Franklin's Road Games, a copy of Goodbye Paradise signed by Ray Barrett (I'm still not sure if that is Pauline Hanson playing an extra in that nightclub scene), a triple pack of Chips Rafferty movies -- Bitter Springs, Eureka Stockade and The Overlanders and a whole bunch of lesser 1970s blaxploitationmovies. So while the digitisation is a lot of pains-taking hard work, there are rewards. Maybe one day I'll even find the time to sit down and rewatch some of these flicks.

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ archive/2003/12/15/DDG923MBEI1.DTLCall them what you will -- obsessive compulsive eccentrics, materialist philosophers or pack-rat artists -- collectors' 'unruly passions' make sense of our worldMonday, December 15, 2003 Steven Winn, Chronicle Arts and Culture Critic ... For some, the collecting impulse morphs into self-destructive hoarding -- newspapers are a common target. Elias Aboujaoude, a psychiatrist at the Stanford School of Medicine, says hoarding occurs in 5 to 15 percent of patients diagnosed as obsessive compulsive. "I don't want to pathologize collecting," says Aboujaoude. "Almost everyone is attached to a certain kind of item." With hoarders, he says, insight-based therapies are largely ineffective. "My experience is that folks who can identify the root causes, some missing relationship in their lives, have not been able to control the behavior." Collecting, hoarding's socially sanctioned cousin, may finally resist scrutiny and causal dissection as well ...

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/ archive/2003/12/13/DDGHU3LI8B1.DTLWriter and raconteur John Baxter collects books as a form of self-expression and as a way to savor -- and live -- the good lifeSaturday, December 13, 2003 James Sullivan, Chronicle Pop Culture Critic For this film biographer, longtime BBC commentator and incurable book hound, books are much more than mere vessels of information. They are treasurable objects utterly essential to the good life, worthy of scouting trips to the four corners of the globe and the joyful surrender of vast sums of money ... and the beloved science fiction of his youth in the Australian bush. The first of Baxter's proposed four volumes of memoir on his lifelong mania, "A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict" (St. Martin's Press, $24.95), has just been published in America following widespread acclaim in England and Europe. Now living in Paris,...